War Ecology: An Environmental History of Peace
Monday 25 January 2027, 12 midday - 1.30pm
Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
All welcome
For nature and the climate, the only thing more dangerous than war is peace – this is the startling claim made by the French philosopher Pierre Charbonnier in his new book War Ecology. Charbonnier shows that we are the heirs of an intellectual and political history which maintained that creating the conditions for peace between human beings requires exploiting nature, exchanging resources and providing sufficient prosperity for all.
This idea, which can be traced back to the eighteenth century, found striking expression in the mid-twentieth century. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the development of fossil fuel infrastructures was combined with a pacifist and universalist discourse that sought to undermine the causes of war by liberating productivity. So peace, or the balance of great powers established by the United States, is largely a gift of fossil fuels, particularly oil. In the twenty-first century, argues Charbonnier, this paradigm has become obsolete, since we must both guarantee peace and security and respect planetary limits – in other words, learn to make peace without destroying the planet. It is in this context that the possibility of a war ecology is emerging, according to which sustainability and security no longer appear as contradictory injunctions but converge in the need to move towards a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Pierre Charbonnier is a philosopher and CNRS researcher at the Centre d'études européennes (CEE) and Sciences Po Paris. He is a specialist of the relationship between nature and society in the modern world. He has published La Composition des mondes (Flammarion, 2014), La Fin d'un grand partage, (CNRS Éditions, 2015), Culture écologique (Presses de Sciences Po, 2022), Affluence and Freedom: An Environmental History of Political Ideas (Polity, 2021). War Ecology (Polity, 2026) is his most recent publication.
